When Jesus asked the woman at the well for a drink of water, she was focused on the horizontal. She thought he was asking for H2O. As our author points out, Jesus is focused on the vertical. John 4:10b,10b … If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink,you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.

Jesus offers her living water. … She must have wondered, ‘What is this living water?’ The best commentary is always the Bible, John 7:37b-39,37b … “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. 38 Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams ofliving water will flow from within him.” 39 By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

For the person thirsting for God, there is no inner newness without receiving God’s wondrous gift, the Holy Spirit, promised and offered by the Son.

The Samaritans were descendants of those who had not been deported or killed in the fall of the northern kingdom in 722 b.c. (2 Kings 17:23–40). These survivors had intermarried with the heathen colonists brought in from Babylonia by the Assyrian conquerors. So these people were looked upon as unclean traitors to Jewish blood.

Furthermore, the Samaritans were confused, even heretical in their religious beliefs. Even though their earlier polytheistic worship, caused by strangers bringing in their own gods, had given way to the worship of Jehovah, they accepted only the five books of Moses as their Scriptures and cut themselves off from the riches of the rest of the Old Testament.

The Samaritans also had hostile feelings toward the Jews. Their offer to help rebuild the temple in Jerusalem after the Jews returned from Babylonian exile had been refused, and this had caused great bitterness (Ezra 4:2). So the Samaritans refused to worship in Jerusalem, preferring their own temple on Mount Gerizim, which had been built about 400 b.c. When this place of worship had been burned by the Jews in about 128 b.c., the relation between these two peoples deteriorated even further. Samaritans on occasion would even detain Jews traveling through their territory. Little wonder then that a Jew would attempt to avoid any contact with these unclean dogs. … But not Jesus! Now He had to go through Samaria.

Day 9. If Jesus met you at “the well,” would He confront you about the truth of your life? Heavy question! Our answer can be revealing if we are being honest with ourselves.
What should we learn from the woman at the well? Excerpt from gotQuestion.org?
The story is full of many truths and powerful lessons for us today. The woman at the well follows on the heels of Jesus’ interaction with Nicodemus, a Pharisee and prominent member of the Jewish Sanhedrin (John 3:1-21).
This was an extraordinary woman not so much because she was a Samaritan, a race of people that the Jews utterly despised as having no claim on their God, but because she was an outcast and looked down upon by her own people. This is evidenced by the fact that she came alone to draw water from the community well when during biblical times drawing water and chatting at the well was the social highpoint of a woman’s day. However, this woman was ostracized and marked as immoral, an unmarried woman living openly with the fifth in a series of men.
In spite of the similarities in the two meetings between Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman, there are differences in the way Jesus unveiled grace to them. While Nicodemus needed to see himself as a sinner in order to understand grace, the Samaritan woman, who knew she was a sinner, needed to see herself as a person of worth and value. And this provides us with one of the most powerful lessons in all of Scripture.
This story teaches us that God finds us worthy of His love in spite of our bankrupt lives. God values us enough to actively seek us, to welcome us to intimacy, and to rejoice in our worship. As a result of Jesus’ conversation, only a person like the Samaritan woman, an outcast from her own people, could understand what this means. To be wanted, to be cared for when no one, not even herself, could see anything of value in her—this is grace indeed.
But there are many other valuable truths we glean from this story. We learn that:
1) Only through Jesus can we obtain and receive eternal life: “Jesus answered, ‘Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’” (John 4:13-14; cf. John 14:6).
2) Jesus’ ministering to those outcasts of the Jewish society (the Samaritans), reveals that all people are valuable to God and that Jesus desires that we demonstrate love to everyone . . . including even our enemies (John 4:7-9; Matthew 5:44).
3) Jesus is the Messiah (John 4:25-26; 1:41; Matthew 27:22; Luke 2:11).
4) Those who worship God, worship Him in spirit and truth (John 4:23-24; Psalm 145:18).
5) Our testimony about Jesus is the most powerful tool we have to lead others to believe in Jesus: “Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, ‘He told me everything I ever did.’ So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, ‘We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world”’ (John 4:39-42).
Additionally, we learn that Jesus' dialogue with the woman at the well presents us with three absolute truths about salvation:
1) Salvation comes only to those who recognize their desperate need for the spiritual life they do not have. Living water can be obtained only by those who recognize that they are spiritually thirsty.
2) Salvation comes only to those who confess and repent of their sin and desire forgiveness. Before this immoral woman could embrace the Savior, she had to concede the full burden of her sins.
3) Salvation comes only to those who take hold of Jesus as their Messiah. For the absolute truth is that salvation is found in no one else (John 14:6; Acts 4:12).

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Steve & Mike

Steve and Mike will post daily reflections on Vertical with Jesus by David and Kim Butts starting on January 1st. We would encourage you come take this journey with us.